McGinty: Arizona law codifies irrational fear

Posted: Sunday, May 16, 2010

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Jessica Colotl committed a crime.

Her parents moved to Atlanta in 1996, fleeing a life of crippling poverty in Mexico, when Colotl was 7 years old. She graduated from Lakeside-DeKalb High School with a 3.8 grade-point average before enrolling in Kennesaw State University in 2006.

During a routine traffic stop just a few weeks ago, however, campus police uncovered her criminal secret. Her offense? Her parents entered the country illegally.

Former state Sen. Eric Johnson, a Savannah Republican now running for governor, has seized upon the arrest to praise her imminent deportation and demand that the state's colleges and universities work to limit educational avenues to illegal immigrants. His grandstanding isn't out of the ordinary. It just makes him the latest politician using the inflammatory issue of illegal immigration to his political benefit. Nathan Deal, another Republican candidate for governor, has pledged, if elected, to implement a version of a controversial Arizona immigration law in Georgia.

It's the law in Arizona that's fueling the majority of this righteous anger. And make no mistake, that law is nothing more than an abomination to the constitutional principles of life and liberty that are the bedrock of this nation.

It requires that all citizens present identification papers proving their citizenship, and those who lack documentation will be arrested and jailed for an indeterminate amount of time. Law enforcement officials are authorized to stop and detain individuals under the most suspect of circumstances in an attempt to seek these papers. What exactly constitutes the necessary documentation? Arizonans will be required to carry around their birth certificates or, if an immigrant, the appropriate naturalization papers.

In Arizona and other Southwestern border states, most illegal immigrants are Hispanic. Given that more than 30 percent of the people in Arizona are Hispanics living in the country legally, it's easy to see the problems with this legislation. For instance, a legal Hispanic citizen who lacks those papers could be falsely accused of being an illegal immigrant and face deportation, all because he or she lacked a document that most Americans have long since misplaced.

Furthermore, given the fact that most illegal immigrants are Hispanic, that ethnic group is going to be unfairly and disproportionately impacted by the law. As a result, it goes beyond basic racial profiling as it also imprisons suspects, with little just cause, for violating a rule that is unfairly subjective in its application and impossible to enforce.

So before you start working to rationalize the supposed merits of this law, ask yourself a few simple questions: Do you carry around your birth certificate? Do you keep it on your person at all times? Would you be comfortable with law enforcement officials arbitrarily stopping you without cause and demanding to see your "papers" as if this was some former Soviet bloc country? Would you be OK if your spouse or sibling was arrested for something so mundane as not being able to produce those documents?

This isn't to suggest there aren't obvious deficiencies with our current system. The federal government has failed miserably in its efforts to secure our borders and protect our ports, and those failures have resulted in an influx of crime and gangs. Arguably, we should double our efforts to put together a more focused approach to border security. That focus, though, shouldn't come at the expense of fundamental constitutional principles and result in the establishment of a de facto police state.

The Arizona law is nothing more than the codification of irrational fear.

Illegal immigration is a crime because we made an attempt to limit unrestricted migration many years ago. But, in doing so, what exactly have we made illegal? We've criminalized the actions of individuals who want nothing more than to better than lives and provide for their families. We've selectively criminalized the pursuit of the American dream.

Or, as Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for The Boston Globe, said in a recent column:

"To say that they cross the border illegally only begs the question. Why should it be illegal for any person to come to the United States, assuming his intentions are peaceful and he is not likely to become a public charge or health risk?"

That's a question Colotl would like answered.

• Johnathan McGinty runs Beyond the Trestle (beyondthetrestle.com), a blog that covers local and state politics.